


more of the stars and sea

by Mizzy



Category: Nowhere Boys (TV)
Genre: Comment Fic, Family, Gen, Post Season One (Nowhere Boys), Sibling Love, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-31
Updated: 2014-01-31
Packaged: 2018-01-10 16:39:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,205
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1162046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mizzy/pseuds/Mizzy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Andy from before had two possible futures: doctor or lawyer. That's what his family are still expecting from him. But after surviving a trip to an alternate reality, Andy knows that anything is possible. And that includes his own future.</p>
            </blockquote>





	more of the stars and sea

**Author's Note:**

> Nowhere Boys is an amazing Australian series - YouTube has it if you're intrigued! :D (There's 13 episodes, only 25 minutes, hella addictive. ♥ COME JOIN US.)
> 
> Written for the Nowhere Boys comment fic meme on LJ - [here](http://nowhere-boys.livejournal.com/895.html). 
> 
> Not beta-read, sorry. 
> 
> Warning: Some vague spoilers for all thirteen episodes. A brief allusion to canonical suicidal ideation.

Andy's had some ridiculous thoughts since coming home.

Worst are the ones that woke him up in the night, gasping for breath and reaching for someone who just isn't there any more, because he needs to talk to someone who'll understand the high-pitched panic that maybe things are wrong. Maybe they've just sidestepped into another alternate reality, one an inch along from theirs. One where the demon can find them and demand their blood with flashing red eyes, can relentlessly give chase until they've squeezed all the air from their lungs.

There are some better ones too – like how much can he wring from this experience with his parents and with the teachers at school? How many boring music assignments can he skip by pulling the _I was lost in the woods with the three stooges_ card? (Because really, Andy's voice sounds like an old, throat-nodule-ridden chicken – music isn't in his future _however_ much Sam keeps texting them all with suggestions about forming a band. One joint song together to get themselves home does _not_ a Top 10 chart hit make.)

The only ridiculous thought he's spoken out-loud to anyone: _Can he legally marry his_ _bed?_

Dad had laughed and ruffled his hair and mentioned something about how a lawyer or doctor could buy a _hundred_ beds. Andy's much too young to commit to a long-term relationship, after all.

Which just led to one more ridiculous thought that had shaken him up more than the world-shaking _holy crap I think we're in an alternate reality_ thought of two weeks ago.

If he's too young to commit to a lifelong relationship with an admittedly extraordinarily comfortable single white metal bed frame with a dual-enforced spring bed and an orthopaedic mattress, then _why_ is he old enough to decide what to spend his lifelong life _doing?_

Law. Medicine. Those have been the only options in his head. He hadn't thought to want more. Both were prestigious. Both would bring his family so much joy, so much to brag about to their customers. _My son is a doctor. My grandson made partner before the age of 30. My brother saved someone's life!_

Granted, that last one, _that's_ a hell of a heady feeling. Ellen's wide smile of gratitude even now is a fire in his gut. A compulsion to do something. To _be_ something more.

Doctor. Lawyer. Both sensible occupations which would settle him for life. He can do them. He could do anything. His memory retention's in the top zero point one percentile. Once he commits to the one he wants, it'll be determined sailing from then out.

Except that had been the Andy of _before._ The Andy who didn't know anything different.

The Andy who hadn't survived an adventure.

Bear Grylls looks down at Andy impassively from the poster still taking position of honour at the head of his bed. Andy sighs up at his idol and wonders if Bear ever had that same dilemma as a kid. Were his parents pushing him in one direction? Or was _survivalist_ stamped in Bear's DNA as well as _lawyer or doctor_ was apparently stamped in Andy's?

He lets out a sound of annoyance and hurls himself backwards on his bed. It creaks a little and one of the springs have detached from the thick mattress, poking him in his back. It's still a thousand times better than a decade-old camping mat and a polyester sleeping bag in a broken-down hut, but it is still missing something.

The noise, Andy thinks. Of the trees rustling in the wind. Of rodents scurrying in the background carrying millions of new germs and diseases ready for Andy to contract at a moment's notice. Of even and slow breaths surrounding him from either side.

He's gone from being needed by his friends to being _wanted_ by his family and Andy can't decide which of those he needs the most.

Jake, Sam and Felix wouldn't make him be a lawyer or a doctor. They wouldn't make him do anything he didn't want to, unless it was for the good of the group, and then Andy was happy to pitch in, to make the equal sacrifice. They know him at his _core,_ at his most decent of values. They know they can trust him, that they can rely on him.

They don't know how manipulative he is – how he can play between his mother and father and grandmother to get what he wants. They don't know that he gets bored in music and thinks it's a waste of his time. They don't know how to speak one word which could spin him into a sulk for _weeks._

That last one comes courtesy of a flash of plaid in his vision as someone passes his open door – Viv's home, carrying something in her arms, muttering something under her breath.

Viv knows him better than anyone. For siblings they're close, even though Nai-Nai likes her better. She's already got letters from the University of Melbourne to study engineering, even though she's five years too young. That's something that Andy had been jealous about _before._ Not the effusive promise of full-ride scholarships and bursaries, but the drive in his sister's gut.

She knew what she wanted to do and she was _going_ for it. Andy remembers with a pang that he didn't even think to question the Viv of the alternate reality. If he thinks about it, of his room bedecked in her curiosities, he can recall the same thick textbooks that Viv's been poring over for months now. Viv of every reality wants to build things with her hands. She _knows_ what she wants to do.

Andy doesn't. Or else _lawyer or doctor_ wouldn't have been running around in his mind like an impossible dilemma.

He gets up from his bed, patting it happily for a second because the relief of being back somewhere that _knows_ him is still not going to mellow anytime soon, and pokes his head around the doorway to see Viv sliding her nearest to-scale engine replica in her room.

"Hey," he says, softly.

Even though his voice is gentle, Viv still startles. She turns, slamming her bedroom door closed too loudly in her shock, and Nai-Nai shrieks up the stairs about inconsiderate childen not letting their loving elders _nap in peace._

Viv shouts down an apology, which just wrings another rapid-fire lecture from Nai-Nai about shouting when she'd asked for quiet. Andy's smile is rueful. If Viv had gone downstairs, Nai-Nai would have complained about the time it took for an apology. If Viv had stayed silent, Nai-Nai would have reprimanded her for not apologising. If there was ever someone Andy took after for his ability to manipulate his family's reactions, it was definitely his Nai-Nai.

"We'd best go in if you want to talk," Viv says, pointing at his room. Andy nods and withdraws to let her in. He sits down as she closes his door gently behind herself, wincing at the quiet click, eyeballing the door as if it can tell her whether Nai-Nai's going to shout again or not.

If Andy shutters his eyes, just for a moment, he can see a flash of the Viv of the alternate reality. The other Viv is a smudge of bright colour, a loud joyous _noise_ , a cacophony of movement and expression. That image flickering across that of _his_ Viv is jarring. The contrast is enough to give him a headache.

The two Vivs align for a moment – this one has turned around and is staring at him like he's stark raving _loony_.

"Viv," Andy says, slowly. He thinks he's the only person in their whole family that can make her name into two syllables.

"Oh, no. It's _your_ turn to shell the prawns tonight, bro. I'm not falling for whatever scatterbrained scheme you think you—"

"I'm not after a trade," Andy says. _Scatterbrain._ No one else in Bremin would even think to call him that, apart from maybe that one Geography teacher at school who subbed his class for a term, and he'd gone on for three pages about entropy on an assignment about global warming.

At home, _scatterbrain_ is an insult wrapped up in a compliment. Dad's a scatterbrain too, but a logical one. He's always dancing between topics but he never misses a step: he can flit from pathological mechanisms of disease to practical photonics and make it seem elegantly logical to someone who doesn't know him.

Jake, Felix, Sam… They know him better than anyone now, but there's a lot about him that they don't know. It feels strange to think that three boys, three _strangers,_ might know the best parts of him better than his own family.

"Then—"

"Can't I just want to talk to my own sister?"

Viv gives him a sceptical look. "About what?"

Andy frowns at her. Life's more complicated when it's not about finding food, fighting demons and figuring out the functional aspects of being an unwitting traveller across an Einstein-Rosen bridge. He almost wishes he was hungry instead of this complicated feeling in his chest. Hunger he knows how to satiate. _Feelings_ , on the other hand, are a hunger that he doesn't know the recipe for.

"I guess I missed you," Andy says. "You know. When I thought I was going to die."

It's a cheap shot, a low trick to getting what he wants, but something in Viv's face softens and she sits at the bottom of his bed, fingers idly tapping across her knees. That had been a shock – his Viv always had to be fiddling with something, fixing an electronic circuit, making a model – alternate Viv had been uncertain with her hands, had taken a moment to pick up her projectiles.

"I thought you were dead," Viv says, looking down at her fingers, her hands stilling for that brief confession before taking up the invisible piano again across her skirt. "I always thought I'd be able to feel it if you were dead. You _felt_ gone."

Andy looks at her profile guiltily. Technically he _had_ been gone. Spirited away. And as much as he would love to write a thank you letter to Bear Grylls about how their survival was down to his skills and knowledge, Andy knows a lot of his survival was down to his new friends.

And down to sheer dumb luck. A ripple of guilt bubbles in the bottom of his stomach. It's either guilt or indigestion – he'd been _relief_ eating since getting back. It was sort of like stress eating, but fuelled by the memory of being torn away from the comfort of home. The way he felt after stumbling to the fridge his first night home, of his fingers closing around a bowl of braised chicken feet, it had been an almost physical gut punch.

Even know he can remember how it felt, the cold meat clammy against his fingers, the way his stomach burned when he ate and ate until they were all gone. His mum found him there at 4am, kneeling on the floor by the glow of the open fridge door, and she pulled him close and rocked him. Nai-nai would have given him a lecture, but that would have been okay, because Andy had even missed that, the melodic discord of his grandmother's angriest tones.

As it was, his mother's hug was even better than the chicken feet, although her damp tears against the skin of his neck was a memory he could have done without.

A memory he nearly didn't have because of his own damn stupidity. When he'd run down that road, fully intending to reach the bus, to step out, thoughts of _Inception_ in his head, wishes of a train coming to take him away, to take him home—

Andy never thought he was a coward. Prudent when it came to dangers, _perhaps_. Prepared for emergencies, unless confronted by hard-headed jocks who kept their brains in their pants, _usually_. A coward…? No, he hadn't thought he was a coward.

Who but a coward, though, would have wanted an easy way out of the nightmare? While it had been a _magical_ solution to get them home, it hadn’t been easy. Andy's throat is still sore from shouting the spell, screaming it into the tornado, eyes and lungs burning from the effort.

Coming home had been hard. He just hadn't expected it to _keep_ being hard.

Like talking to his own damn sister. Even when they were fighting – and oh boy, did they ever know how to fight: in quiet, in small gestures that Nai-Nai wouldn't pick up and scold them on; in passive-aggressive moments which left them sore and aching at each other for weeks until mum and dad sat them down to apologise to each other; in vicious cutting insults which dove directly at their weak spots – it was never difficult to _talk_.

"I've just been thinking," Andy says.

Viv side-glances at him. "Did it hurt?"

Andy's grin is honest, wide. "Ouch, wounded, right in the heart. By my _favourite sister._ " He purses his lips for a moment. "By my _least_ favourite sister."

"I'm your _only_ sister, genius," Viv says.

Andy flickers her a wry expression. "I guess my near—" It's too cruel to say _near-death_ to Viv, especially when she keeps giving him those wide, haunted expressions sometimes. "My brush with disaster out in the bush," he amends. "It's made me contemplate a lot of things. About us. About the things we take for granted."

"I guess after eleven days of lying over tree trunks, a bed is a pretty good thing," Viv says, patting his bedframe. She looks at him for a moment, contemplatively. "Sorry, am I touching up your new girlfriend?"

"Ha," Andy says. "And Bed here is my fiancée, thank you very much."

"I think she likes me better."

Andy snuffles a laugh and a smile curves its way onto the edges of Viv's lips. "I think you missed me," he declares.

Viv's mouth opens, comically wide. "You _wish._ "

"I missed you too," he says, cajoling her real response.

"Fine. I guess I missed you too. A little." She gives him a sly look. "It was nice not to have someone breaking my circuits under the guise of giving me advice."

"Hey, I'm not the one who—" Andy starts, a familiar argument heating the rhythm of his words, and he swallows the sentence back. He doesn't want to fight with Viv.

He wants to understand her. In the way that crossing to an alternate reality made him understand _himself_.

"I've just been thinking about the future, and our upbringing, and—" He flounders. He can't think of a sane way to put _alternate Viv dressed experimentally and acted out without me there to rein her in_.

"And?" Viv prompts.

Andy sighs. "I mean… Don't you ever wish you were more…" Andy gestures, an expansive movement with his fingers outstretched, because there isn't a word in either of his family's languages to explain what he means, so impromptu sign language is all that remains.

Viv's eyes widen behind the lenses of her glasses. "If that's some perverted way of saying you think I'm flat-chested, I—"

"Ew! No! _Viv._ " Andy backs up and nearly falls off his bed with the speed of it, a flail of a movement which feels more relevant to the Andy of before, the Andy who didn't know how to throw aside his worry and _act._ It feels like a massive step back. Like he's holding into the timid shadow he was before.

Not that he ever _thought_ of himself as a timid shadow. Andy thought his life was bright and full of opportunity, teeming with options. _Lawyer,_ his brain reminds him. _Doctor._

How could a life so full of possibility only have two endings?

He sighs. "I guess I've just been thinking of what it was like not to have me around. Have me _squashing_ you. I can't shake the feeling that without me here, you would have more freedom to—" He gestures again. "Grow. Experiment."

"I've got several experiments on the go, actually," Viv says. "Dad's been letting me use one of his tables. As a distraction, I think. So I wouldn't go off running into the woods to try and find you."

Andy sighs. It's hard to put what he's thinking into words when he can't say _you've been wearing the same style clothes for your whole life and you actually looked pretty rocking in black._ After being startled by Viv's appearance, Andy had liked it. Had liked the idea of his sister branching out and finding herself.

Or maybe it was because in that world, Viv had been less driven. Less locked on course to being the world's brightest, youngest, Australian engineer. She'd made Andy feel less of a failure for not being able to choose between medicine and law.

"Hey," Viv says, and she shuffles closer, tugging at him until he puts his head on her shoulder, the way they used to sit when they were younger and had stolen all of the longan Nai-Nai had brought in for new year celebrations and were hiding in some nook, eating it by the handful and giggling together. Her breathing is a different rhythm to Jake, Felix and Sam's distinctive noises, but it's a tangible comfort nonetheless. "You've had a shock, Andy. An experience a lot of people would have rolled over and _died_ had it happened to them. But you didn't. You fought through it and you came home. It's only natural that you'll be a bit… rattled."

"I just—" Andy exhales. It's easier to say some of it when not looking at his sister. When not transposing two worlds over this one face that he knows better than his own. "Life was easier before. And now I know what I'm capable of, I don't—" He huffs a small breath, and says in a smaller voice, "What do you think mum and dad would say if I said I didn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer any more?"

Viv's quiet for a long moment, too long, and Andy tenses to move away – but her dancing fingers find his hands and cling on, staying still to hold onto him. "Do you know _what_ you want to do instead?"

A thousand options run through Andy's head. A million. He swallows, because that's the line of questioning he'd get from his parents if he ever thought of bringing it up. But this isn't _them._ He's in his bedroom, on his lovely bed, with his quiet focussed sister who doesn't do anything more daring with her hair than a ponytail. This is safe – a trial run. If Viv doesn't respond well, he'll never bring it up with anyone else, because there's no point.

"No," Andy admits, because that's what this whole adventure has told him. New Andy still isn't the _bravest_ person in the world, but he's still braver than old Andy, who never would have even dared to _think_ no.

"I'm so jealous," Viv sighs and Andy launches upwards at that.

"What do you even—"

Viv looks at him, her expression almost bittersweet and regretful. "I've known since falling out of the crib – literally – that I wanted to build things and fix things and make them better. I've never known how it feels not to be tethered to your own wants. Your own _drive._ You—Even with your indecision before… Medicine and law… I was even envious then."

Andy makes a choking sound and thinks again that they might be wrong, that they might still even now be in the wrong reality.

"Because as an engineer, I'm limited. My future is constrained. There's a finite number of things that I can become with an engineering doctorate." Viv's confidence in her academic future has never been shaken. As it shouldn't. She's as smart as their dad and much savvier with those smarts. "Even when you were stuck between medicine and law… _So_ many more options. So much more possibilities. And now—" She smiles widely at him. "You could be _anything._ You could go into space, or fight fires, or go to Hollywood."

"I could build houses."

"You could go to war."

"I could take over the restaurant from Nai-Nai."

"You could trek the world, and be the next Bear Grylls." Viv sneaks a rueful look up at Andy's poster.

Andy follows her gaze and shakes his head. The idea of doing what Bear Grylls did… He hadn't thought he had the strength. Maybe he does. Something stings at his eyes. His sister's joy, maybe. The real excitement in her voice at his endless possibilities. At the sheer mathematical truth in her reasoning, which tells him that her envy is genuine. "But mum and dad—" he says, "they've always—And Aunty Carrie is always bragging about her surgeon sons—"

Viv slams a hand down on his shoulder to make him look at her. "You've just come back from the dead, Andy."

Andy opens his mouth to protest, but Viv shakes her head, and there are tears in her eyes, so he shuts up.

"You came _back from the dead_ ," she repeats firmly. "There's no better tool for manipulation in your arsenal than that. Mum and dad would let you do _anything_ at this point in time. And sure, you could use it to try and get out of shelling prawns – or for eating a whole bowl of chicken feet in the middle of the night—"

Andy colours, embarrassed.

"—but you could use it for _this,_ " Viv says. "For making sure you have a future you're _happy_ with. Y'know. Now you definitely have a future and all."

"Yeah," Andy says. His throat feels tight, but maybe that's what freedom feels like.

"Well, I've got to go pick up some parts from the mechanics," Viv says. "You want to come with?"

"Nah. I thought I'd commune with my wife-to-be for a little while longer," Andy says. "You know. While I'm still getting away with stuff."

Viv rolls her eyes and gets to her feet. She pauses with her hand on the door and looks between him and the post speculatively. "So you think you'll do it?" Viv says, pointing at his poster. "Be the next Bear Grylls?"

"Nah," Andy says, and Viv looks honestly surprised. "I might consider being the next _Andy Lau_ though."

Viv's smile at that is delight and warmth and _home_. There'd been a point in the restaurant kitchen in bizarro world where Andy was arguing with his dad, and Andy had actually honestly thought he might be able to convince them he was their son, that he might have been able to get his alternate reality family to take him in.

It's only now that he can see the real truth. Those people had his family's names, their faces, their DNA. Their house.

They still weren't _home._ This is home.

Viv is home.

"I don't care _what_ mum and dad _ever_ expected of you," Viv says. "If they're not happy with that, I'll—"

"You'll _what_?"

"Deny them grandchildren," Viv says briskly, grinning at him wickedly. "Considering my future sister-in-law's a piece of furniture, it looks like _I'll_ be the one conceding to the grandchildren expectations. And I might as well follow my bro's example and use things as leverage to get what I want."

"Ah, my wicked work to subvert your goodness and become the favourite grandchild is _working,_ " Andy crows.

Viv reaches in, grabs an object from his sideboard, and flings it at him with accuracy, slamming his door shut before he can retaliate. He smothers a smile when he hears a burst of noise from Nai-Nai, telling Viv off for her noisiness again.

Infinite possibilities. Andy could become _anything._

Old Andy would have been terrified at the prospect, but… that's not who he is any more. And maybe his worst nightmares are true, and this isn't the same reality they once left from, even though it's _much_ more similar than the other place had been – but if it is, Andy's sure he can handle it.

He can handle _anything._ Andy thinks about it and gets off his bed to reach up, to finally pull down the bright green Bear Grylls poster from his wall. Bear had been his inspiration to survive. Maybe that was what his life was before. _Survival._ Do what was necessary to become a doctor or lawyer and make his family proud.

Survival he can do.

It's _living_ that's his next challenge.

He carefully slides the poster into a tube and lowers himself back down onto his bed, staring up at the now empty white wall. When they moved into this house, sizing-up when they'd had Nai-Nai to think about after Ye-Ye's death, the wall had seemed scarily empty. Sticking Bear up had strengthened him. Made him feel less alone in the white expanse of the room.

Back then, the empty canvas had been terrifying. But now… it's a comforting sight. Full of endless possibilities and bursting with potential. And instead of being anxious, like old Andy might have been, _this_ Andy can just settle back onto his pillows and enjoy the view.


End file.
